In this greatly progressing, information-oriented age, character data processing systems, especially for computers, have been expanding their fields of application day by day and are fast becoming indispensable to our daily life. Although the speed of information transmission and abundance of information contained in Chinese characters exceed that of any western language characters, the encoding and printing of Chinese data remains a very complicated process because of the great volume of characters, and the complicated two-dimensional construction of each character.
Chinese data processing systems have recently been commercialized. To print out a desired character with these systems, the operator must index it from thousands of keys on an input keyboard and operate the keys at least twice. A computer handling data encoded in this manner must store all of the information concerning the various styles of Chinese characters. Taking ten thousand commonly used Chinese characters, for example, if each character is stored by a 16 .times. 16 dot matrix, the total number of bits of storage required is 2.56 .times. 10.sup.6 bits. This system therefore is not only inconvenient for input encoding but also extremely expensive.